Donald Trump and the rise and rise of the Christian nationalists

S peaking to an audience of Christian conservative voters recently, Donald Trump told them: “You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

In typical Trump style, what he meant was not spelled out. Even given an opportunity to row back from his words on Fox News the following day, he refused to clarify his statement or deny it had suggested an end to elections in America.

Trump has a habit of making these sorts of vague and ambiguous statements – guaranteeing himself coverage in successive media cycles by generating column inches about what he may have meant. As one journalist wrote before the 2016 election: “The press takes him literally but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally.”

As a result, it could be easy to dismiss his words as mere artful media manipulation.

Then again, some supporters might interpret his words as saying another Trump term would solve all of America’s problems – or at least, the Republican right’s problems. He could stuff every court with conservative jurists, gerrymander the electoral boundaries, and support further voter suppression laws to ensure permanent Republican majorities, so that it didn’t matter who won next time round.

For others, Trump’s obvious narcissism can be used to explain his focus solely on the next election, as if he was saying “one more time for me”. Except that is not what he said.

“You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

It is equally plausible to see Trump’s words as a message to Christian nationalists – a hint that he supports their belief that adherence to their interpretations of biblical theology should have precedence over the US Constitution and the will of the people.

Trump as Christian ‘champion’

Despite his adultery, lies, criminality and other personal failings, Trump professes to be a Christian and has courted the support of the evangelical movement in particular. He has followed through on his promises to appoint conservative Christians to senior judicial positions. This has been key to restricting women’s reproductive rights and has secured Trump a key block of the conservative electoral coalition.

But the subset of Christian nationalists, which some suggest amounts to roughly 10% of the US population, are distinctive in that they advocate for Christianity to be the official, dominant religion of the US.

This lobby wields disproportionate influence through the Council for National Policy, which has massive financial backing and is very sophisticated in its use of targeted messaging. Its influence is evident in the policy positions of those seeking to shape the agenda of a second Trump administration, such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

It is the Christian nationalists who have successfully agitated for the display of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana schools, and the banning of books throughout the US that suggest LGBTQ+ lifestyles are normal. Implicit in their political agenda is the preservation of the dominant position of white Christian conservatives within America’s political and cultural institutions, at this time of rapid, social, political and democratic change.

White fear of ‘replacement’

Trump’s appeal in 2016 should be seen in light of the historical and cultural circumstances in which that campaign was fought. His administration followed the eight-year tenure of America’s first black president, Barack Obama.

During Obama’s election campaign in 2007-08, Trump led the “birther movement” disputing the idea that Obama was native born and therefore qualified to be president. This was despite the well-documented and easily accessible fact that Obama – like Trump himself – had one foreign-born and one native-born parent and was born in Hawaii, a US state.

The not-so-subtle message was that Obama was not entitled to run because he offended what some people regarded as a key feature of being American: whiteness. Trump’s deliberate mispronunciation of “Ka-ma-la” Harris and his cackhanded disputation of her “blackness” are further dog whistles to this voting block.

The demographic anxiety of sections of America’s white population that fuels this sort of prejudice in part stems from the decline of its share of the population. Between 2010 and 2020, the share of the white population fell from 63.7% to 57.8%, while for those under 18 the figure is now 47.3%. For 22% of Americans, this is regarded as bad news, and for Americans over 65, 32% see this shift as bad for society in general.

So much of the appeal of of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement is the retrospective desire to return to a previous age where white Christian patriarchal dominance was an established feature of all American political and cultural institutions and life. It is partly for this reason that Harris has adopted the campaign slogan “We are not going back”.

In ending up with the first US presidential candidate both of whose parents are “foreign-born” (in India and Jamaica), the Democratic Party is leaning into the demographic and cultural changes that are changing the face of American society. As a woman of South Asian and Caribbean heritage, Harris embodies the differences between herself and Trump and his running-mate J.D. Vance – and between the old America of MAGA and the new demographics of 2024.

Yet, despite these shifting trends as to who America is – and which identities its citizens wish to embrace – the election in November will not be decided by these factors alone. A critical consideration will be who among the registered voters is motivated to come out and vote (only 46% in the 2022 midterm elections), and how they are mediated through an electoral college system that privileges voters from the least populous, most conservative and whitest states.

It is this that may ultimately determine whether America will, as Trump insisted in his ambiguous way, “be fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote” again.

Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 3 August 2024. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Trump White House Archived. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)